How to Use Evernote to Acheive Inbox Zero

Seeing email only once

I hate seeing the same email in my mailbox more than once. That means that I am doing something wrong. I view email as my old school physical mailbox. It´s a place where someone leaves my mail, and once I have checked it, I should be gone.

In order to get mail out of the inbox, you need a system for what to do. I think this should be as simple as possible. If not you tend to need a system to set up your system.

The One Software

So after years of testing different software, methodologies, and systems - one is a winner for all. I don´t care what you do or how you like to work, Evernote is for everybody. The setup might be hard, but that´s a topic for a different post.

So back to the email focus. The most important thing you can do for inbox zero is to divide your email into the action and reference items. Where you keep your action items might differ a lot, but most people can benefit from Evernote as a reference system.

Forward To Evernote

The basic setup to make this happen is to forward emails from your mailbox to Evernote. To do this, you grab your unique email address for Evernote and add it to your contact list.

That being said, why would you need newsletters even to hit your mailbox? I am sure you have individual emails that can be sent directly to Evernote. That means that you subscribe to newsletters with your Evernote email address. Then your newsletters will arrive at your Evernote inbox without even touching your mailbox. That´s awesome because if you are like me, you don´t have newsletters that are urgent to read.

Automate

The other method to get mail into Evernote is setting up forwarding rules. Setting up these can be done in all mailboxes. I have set up both Mail and GSuite to send to Evernote. These options are useful because not all non-human email is a subscription. And you might want some of the emails from a sender to arrive in the mailbox. Using more advanced filtering, you can only forward some of the emails from a specific sender to your Evernote inbox.

Setting up this system will take you a long step closer to inbox zero.